Global warming! Political unrest! Corruption! Despair! Sadness!
These are the ailments of the story of Tomorrowland, and the proposed solutions to them are as heavy-handed as they appear above.
The story is about a teenage girl, Casey (Britt Robertson), who holds herself to be fearless, ambitious, and incredibly bright. She is one of the few optimists left in a world (much like ours today) that is wallowing in despair over dystopian nightmares being realized and where the melting of the ice caps is both figurative and literal. And what's worse, she's the only one to think that there is a solution to all the world's ailments. She is "recruited" by a young girl from Tomorrowland, who shows her a glimpse of an alternate dimension where the best and brightest of the world gather and build a utopian society, or so they think. The problem is that they stopped recruiting when they saw that the world will end using technology they created that could predict the future, or at least see one version of it. In other words, they've given up hope in fixing our world. Frank (George Clooney) was one of their citizens that spoke out against this policy and was banished. He is put together with Casey and they travel to Tomorrowland to stop the world from ending in a matter of months, told by Frank's homemade doomsday clock.
Tomorrowland is a movie that runs on nostalgia and underlying it is a bankrupt moral philosophy on solving the world's problems. Imagine the philosophy underlying TED talks (technology, engineering, and design will solve the world's problems) making a movie for children to watch and be inspired to adopt their meta solution to the world's ailments. The solution is that we don't have enough "dreamers" working together building innovative and well-designed inventions. People don't believe they're special enough, and they give in to their sadness and don't believe in themselves.
What's painfully missing from Tomorrowland is any conscience. Even tonight before I saw the movie I had a conversation with a friend over "Jurassic World" coming out this summer and my fears on what they might do to the story. In the worst case, they make the movie about dinosaurs. In the best case, they carry the theme of the relationship of science and morality that upheld the first movie so well and showed the terror that innovation without a conscience (that word even means "with science" though I know it wasn't coined with that in mind per se) brings.
The only vices in our world, according to Tomorrowland, is being uninventive and a pessimist. Ironically, the movie revels in cliché after cliché, hoping we'll be wowed by the mediocre spectacles that are references to older future-chic tropes.
The theme that runs throughout the movie and eventually shows its own superficiality and impotence is the value of raw optimism. I'll contrast this to the virtue of grit which is the far more superior trait to hold. Optimism is simply being positive where grit is more akin to courage. One is a formation of outlook, the other is drive. Certainly Casey is optimistic, but where the movie gets it wrong is saying that's all we need.
Also there's the assumption that raw talent is what we have as the resource to tap for solving the world's problem. And with this view it shows that there are the gifted dreamers, then there's everyone else. Where the movie is misleading is in how it tells young viewers that believing in yourself and being special is all you need to solve these age-old problems the world is fraught with. Our time is terrible and we need optimists. What Casey never does in the movie, and what any inventor or great thinker will tell you about genius is that it takes a lot of work. They fail. They fail a lot, and they get up and they edit their work. They learn from their mistakes and they build a better invention next time. They learn when to scrap a project, and when to stick with it. Learning that virtue will serve our young people better than mere optimism. Certainly optimism is a part of it, though it's only one facet to a complex set of character traits.
The problem is that Casey never fails in the movie. If anything she waltzes into every situation and seems to know more than everyone else, and she never has to work at anything. You never seen any of her inventions (though she does have a cool security camera disrupting drone she uses), you never see her take a crack at something and it not work. She just bulldozes into situations with overconfidence that smacks of arrogance and somehow the inept adults in the story never thought of incredibly obvious solutions to problems in the story.
In the end, Tomorrowland falls too short to be called anything worth watching. The story has too many uninteresting characters with a plot that doesn't pick up and when it finally does you ask yourself, "Is that it?" You'll feel cheated, much like you would if you thought optimism will solve the world's problems.
These are the ailments of the story of Tomorrowland, and the proposed solutions to them are as heavy-handed as they appear above.
The story is about a teenage girl, Casey (Britt Robertson), who holds herself to be fearless, ambitious, and incredibly bright. She is one of the few optimists left in a world (much like ours today) that is wallowing in despair over dystopian nightmares being realized and where the melting of the ice caps is both figurative and literal. And what's worse, she's the only one to think that there is a solution to all the world's ailments. She is "recruited" by a young girl from Tomorrowland, who shows her a glimpse of an alternate dimension where the best and brightest of the world gather and build a utopian society, or so they think. The problem is that they stopped recruiting when they saw that the world will end using technology they created that could predict the future, or at least see one version of it. In other words, they've given up hope in fixing our world. Frank (George Clooney) was one of their citizens that spoke out against this policy and was banished. He is put together with Casey and they travel to Tomorrowland to stop the world from ending in a matter of months, told by Frank's homemade doomsday clock.
Tomorrowland is a movie that runs on nostalgia and underlying it is a bankrupt moral philosophy on solving the world's problems. Imagine the philosophy underlying TED talks (technology, engineering, and design will solve the world's problems) making a movie for children to watch and be inspired to adopt their meta solution to the world's ailments. The solution is that we don't have enough "dreamers" working together building innovative and well-designed inventions. People don't believe they're special enough, and they give in to their sadness and don't believe in themselves.
What's painfully missing from Tomorrowland is any conscience. Even tonight before I saw the movie I had a conversation with a friend over "Jurassic World" coming out this summer and my fears on what they might do to the story. In the worst case, they make the movie about dinosaurs. In the best case, they carry the theme of the relationship of science and morality that upheld the first movie so well and showed the terror that innovation without a conscience (that word even means "with science" though I know it wasn't coined with that in mind per se) brings.
The only vices in our world, according to Tomorrowland, is being uninventive and a pessimist. Ironically, the movie revels in cliché after cliché, hoping we'll be wowed by the mediocre spectacles that are references to older future-chic tropes.
The theme that runs throughout the movie and eventually shows its own superficiality and impotence is the value of raw optimism. I'll contrast this to the virtue of grit which is the far more superior trait to hold. Optimism is simply being positive where grit is more akin to courage. One is a formation of outlook, the other is drive. Certainly Casey is optimistic, but where the movie gets it wrong is saying that's all we need.
Also there's the assumption that raw talent is what we have as the resource to tap for solving the world's problem. And with this view it shows that there are the gifted dreamers, then there's everyone else. Where the movie is misleading is in how it tells young viewers that believing in yourself and being special is all you need to solve these age-old problems the world is fraught with. Our time is terrible and we need optimists. What Casey never does in the movie, and what any inventor or great thinker will tell you about genius is that it takes a lot of work. They fail. They fail a lot, and they get up and they edit their work. They learn from their mistakes and they build a better invention next time. They learn when to scrap a project, and when to stick with it. Learning that virtue will serve our young people better than mere optimism. Certainly optimism is a part of it, though it's only one facet to a complex set of character traits.
The problem is that Casey never fails in the movie. If anything she waltzes into every situation and seems to know more than everyone else, and she never has to work at anything. You never seen any of her inventions (though she does have a cool security camera disrupting drone she uses), you never see her take a crack at something and it not work. She just bulldozes into situations with overconfidence that smacks of arrogance and somehow the inept adults in the story never thought of incredibly obvious solutions to problems in the story.
In the end, Tomorrowland falls too short to be called anything worth watching. The story has too many uninteresting characters with a plot that doesn't pick up and when it finally does you ask yourself, "Is that it?" You'll feel cheated, much like you would if you thought optimism will solve the world's problems.